I know there was a thread before asking how to do tabs for ePubs, but the answers seemed not quite satisfying to me, since I always try to avoid markup, that is not semantically correct.

I am asking this question because I currently work on an ePub which has a list with a negative indent. That means, there are 1-2 words that need to stand out introducing the text following (hope this is understandable). So the following text in the paragraph needs to be lined up without having varying spaces in the first line. I can better illustrate this with a screenshot:

So is there a better way to have the text lined up as you'd normally do with tabs than by creating a table?
InDesign uses in their ePub-export a the little character code for tabs "& #9;" (without the space in between), but this doesn't seem to work, at least in my browser (safari), and I don't know how to set up a space width for that. Another way would be the <pre> tag, but this is only acceptable for writing code since it uses fixed-lenght fonts.
On my recherche I also stumbled upon a something called the <tab>-tag, but my only source for that is this link: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/tabs.html which I think may be a little outdated and I don't know if this was ever supported in HTML let alone reading devices.

I'd love to see a better way to handle fixed spacings in CSS/HTML, that is both easy to implement in ePub workflows and also semantically happy. But I kind of gave up hope that there is a perfect solution… maybe you guys have any idea?

Toxaris, that is exactly what I've done here before. The problem is, that the spacing is not always equal, especially when numbers have more than one position.

Jellby, yep, that was my intention. Your answer is not quite what I hoped for, but it seems there is no other way than using tables. (I don't like floats, they always mess up things ) Maybe W3C should work on this issue for their next CSS/HTML standards…

Thanks a lot, Jellby, this solution works very well for me and I really hope that the display attribute is fully supported by most e-Readers. (it's not clearly forbidden in Accessible EPUB 3 Content Guidelines, so I think it should work) Of course, it's alot more markup than I'd like to have but for now I have to get used to it.

<style type="text/css">
div.indentlist p {
margin-left:3em;
text-indent:-3em;
}
span.label {
display:inline-block;
width:3em;
text-indent:0;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="indentlist">
<p><span class="label">One:</span>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is an example of an english sentence with all the letters of the alphabet.BTW, to get this text nicely aligned, you should not have a space after &lt;/span&gt;</p>
<p><span class="label">Two:</span>The Sahara desert contains enough sand to cover almost all of northern Africa. If you put all the salmon fished in Alaska during one season along Route 66, the stink would be simply awful.</p>
</div>

Thanks Jellby. That works great. I tried that with sections and it works well too. The page numbers don't align up on the right, if you have any idea. Anyway, Digital Editions (and thus readers) don't like any of this very much so maybe I do have to restort to a table.